A country once split by ethnic hatreds is now a target for Islamic terrorism.
TORONTO — The series of suicide attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, which left some 200 dead and hundreds injured, are more than just a national or religious tragedy. For members of the Sri Lankan diaspora, including Catholics like me, who have family connections to the very places and parishes that were attacked, the country’s tribulations are no longer terrible, local and hard to explain to people unfamiliar with its unsettled history. Now they are terrible, local — and familiar.
Much of the world knows the outlines of Sri Lanka’s historic troubles — a three-decade civil war, fought along ethnic lines and punctuated by hundreds of suicide bombings carried out by the Tamil Tiger terrorist organization. But broad international interest in the island nation, and familiarity with its struggles, has largely been confined to the story of its civil war, which ended in 2009, and, at most, to ongoing, uneven reconciliations and renewals that have played out since then.
Now a new, shared context has emerged: All evidence so far suggests that the attacks were carried out by locally based Islamic terrorists.
The attackers knew their targets well, and seem to have chosen them for maximum symbolic value. St. Anthony’s, in the capital city of Colombo, is a national shrine, whose turn-of-the-19th-century origins are associated with the persecution of local Catholics by the country’s then-colonial Dutch rulers.
It has long been a place frequented by travelers — domestic and foreign, Catholic and non-Catholic — before they begin journeys around the island. On my last family trip to Sri Lanka, with four overtired, overheating children in the back seat, our driver took a maddeningly inefficient route out of the traffic-clogged big city just so he could first pray for the intercession of St. Anthony for a safe trip.
